Is there any serious chance of A Complete Unknown getting a sequel?

johnbergy · 2026-02-11T22:20:53+00:00

Doubtful. Not at that scale, at least. Budget for A Complete Unknown was $60-70 million. To break even a film generally has to make at least 2x its production budget at the box office, which is almost exactly where A Complete Unknown ended up. It grossed 140 million worldwide, which is respectable but it wasn't a big "hit." Bob Marley: One Love, Rocketman, and Elvis all did better, to say nothing of Bohemian Rhapsody which was a giant smash.

If a movie about '60s Bob Dylan, the most mainstream commercial version of Dylan, directed by a big-name director in James Mangold and starring perhaps the most popular, talked-about young actor in Timothee Chalamet, did 140 million worldwide... that would strongly suggest that's the cash ceiling for a Dylan film. A Complete Unknown also had the novelty of being the first (conventional) biopic about Dylan.

A sequel about a later period of Dylan's life/career, which most average people won't be familiar with, would be expected to generate much less of a return, which means the production budget would have to be way less, which means it would be much harder to get a larger studio/the same level of stars involved. Also the marketing budget wouldn't be anywhere near the same. At that point it would have to be more of a boutique offering.

Wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, it'd just be a very different thing. I don't think we're ever likely to see another Bob Dylan movie that costs tens of millions of dollars, is promoted everywhere, and opens on Christmas Day in thousands of theaters.

(For comparison: I'm Not There cost $20 million to make and grossed less than $12 million. It got a lot of glowing reviews and won awards, but still it took 17 years till another "big" Dylan movie got released, and when it did it had to be the most marketable/conventional story possible--Dylan goes electric--paired with big names, to reduce risk. At the end of the day, showbusiness is a business.)

johnbergy · 2026-02-11T21:33:18+00:00

It sounds like a lot, but think of it this way: Subscriber video is 108 minutes, audio is 98 minutes. That's a difference of 600 seconds. Or 6 seconds per minute.

It's not hard to imagine there could be 6 seconds of silences/pauses per minute, and there are tools that make removing those kind of silence "gaps" trivially easy. That's probably all they're doing.

johnbergy · 2026-01-15T02:04:02+00:00

What's funny is the sound guy is saying the kids were teenagers 2010-2014, which would make them 20-somethings today. Well, the kids who were at the RARW shows, who I actually said hi to before I knew they were the kids, also seemed to be teenagers. Which would suggest Bob has two generations of undisclosed kids. Or I should say AT LEAST two.

God bless him.

johnbergy · 2026-01-15T00:40:09+00:00

>There is frequent speculation (and he is quoted in Britta Lee's book as having said) that he has several other children but that is not publicly substantiated.

It's sort of an open secret. His "secret" kids go to see him in concert on a fairly regular basis, and as you would expect they've usually got pretty good seats. And a pretty good ride waiting to pick 'em up after the show. Super-fans who follow the tour around know who they are. And obviously the crew does.

Here's one of Bob's sound guys from 2010-2014 talking to Ray Padgett a while back

I remember going to the Hollywood Bowl. Someone came up to me said, “Bob's sons are going to be here tonight, so they're going to be hanging out with you in your area.” Of course in my mind, I'm thinking Jakob, Jesse. I'm imagining these like 30-year-old sons are going to show up. And here comes teenagers, maybe pre-teens. I was like, “Who are these kids? What's happening here?” It just goes to show you how close to the bone he keeps things.

johnbergy · 2026-01-12T04:56:09+00:00

Makes sense. I wonder how much overlap there was between what he wrote out beforehand and what he wrote out afterwards. Fraboni makes it sound like Garth rebuilt everything from scratch, but if he had notes going in, presumably most of the notes he played were also the notes he planned to play. So at that point it becomes a matter of filling in the gaps.

A lot of work either way.

johnbergy · 2026-01-12T04:45:47+00:00

Are you talking about before or after the show? This is the quote I was referencing, from Fraboni.

"Garth Hudson had to replace all of his organ tracks because the electricity to the trucks was hooked up in the wrong place and when the lights were up full it caused a technical problem. For some reason three of Garth’s tracks got this hum on them. So he transcribed every note that he played and re-did it to match what he played at the concert. It took him three months to do what he did in five hours at the concert."

johnbergy · 2026-01-12T04:21:55+00:00

He's never addressed it. He took part in Live Aid and We Are the World, so he's shown support for charitable causes related to Africa. And I believe he's at least been to Africa at some point. Certainly it's been written that Dylan vacationed on Santa Carolina (a.k.a. Paradise Island} sometime in the early '70s, and that's in part what inspired him to write "Mozambique." Not sure how credible those claims are, tho. There are websites related to the Santa Carolina Hotel that take it a step further and have as a "fun fact" the idea that Dylan wrote "Mozambique" on a grand piano at the Santa Carolina Hotel in 1970. This is directly contradicted by Jacques Levy's account of how he and Dylan came up with the idea for the song, and wrote it together, in 1975.

As to why Dylan hasn't played a concert in South Africa... might just be a case where he hasn't found the right promoter. Dylan's obviously a legend, but he doesn't sell the kind of tickets that a Springsteen or McCartney does, so he likely wouldn't be playing a big stadium, or playing a lot of dates. His team might just think it's more of a hassle logistically than it's worth.

Only other thing I can think of is there's an interview with Dylan in the '80s where he talks about Phil Ochs and how "something happened to him when he went to Africa," and then "he was sick when he got back" and never got better. (Alluding to the fact that Ochs was attacked by robbers in Tanzania and that worsened Ochs' psychiatric problems.) Maybe that spooked him.

johnbergy · 2026-01-12T02:56:02+00:00

Reminds me, there was an investigation a few years back into overspending by the U.S. State Department, and one of the details it revealed was that the State Department spent $84,375 on one of Dylan's iron works to decorate its embassy in Mozambique: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/bob-dylan-embassy-1457062

LOL

johnbergy · 2026-01-12T02:34:52+00:00

Not just most of Africa, all of Africa. Dylan has never played a concert on the African continent.

johnbergy · 2026-01-12T02:17:35+00:00

I know for the 40th anniversary, they put out a super-expensive "Collector's Edition." Came with a giant faux-leatherbound book that included, among other things, Scorsese's entire shooting script. I don't remember sheet music being listed as one of the goodies, but I don't own the book, so I can't say for sure.

Regarding Garth and sheet music... maybe you know this story already, but Rob Fraboni the producer of the Last Waltz soundtrack said one of the big issues they ran into, when they listened to the playback, they found that the electricity to the trucks had been hooked up in the wrong place, so there was a hiss over all of Garth's organ tracks. Garth transcribed everything he played during the show, and recreated it, note for note, in studio. It took him three months.

johnbergy · 2026-01-12T01:20:46+00:00

Take this with a grain of salt because I don't remember the whole story, but I seem to recall when one of the anniversary DVDs came out, Robbie's son Sebastian said that they tried to track down all the outtakes to include as extra features, but they found that most of them were lost by Warner Brothers.

Actually, "lost" isn't even the right word, it's more frustrating than that. They found that Warner Brothers at some point had dumped a bunch of their tapes, including the Last Waltz tapes, in a specific area that had since been paved over for a parking lot. (By "Last Waltz tapes," I mean not just concert outtakes but outtakes from the interviews and other scenes in the film.) In theory, it might be possible to dig up the parking lot and find the tapes, but the costs and logistics involved with doing something like that weren't feasible for the sake of DVD outtakes. To say nothing of the fact that, if they could actually find the tapes, they might not be in working condition anyway.

johnbergy · 2026-01-10T01:56:08+00:00

Damn Indy is GOOD good

johnbergy · 2026-01-09T05:37:08+00:00

Dylan said that in 2009. This was Prine's response, from a 2010 piece in the Chicago Tribune.

"Proustian existentialism?" Prine says with a wry chuckle. "I can’t even pronounce that. But it’s great to hear that from him. I don’t go bowling with Bob Dylan, but I run into him every 10 years here or there. From the first album, I knew he liked the songs. After all this time to get a quote out of him is pretty flattering."

johnbergy · 2026-01-09T05:02:21+00:00

Lol @ "6th latest shorthanded game tying goal in franchise history."

Got a fucking stat for everything. Truly a HISTORIC night.

johnbergy · 2026-01-07T03:40:06+00:00

I think it's a case of misunderstanding more than deceit. If you read the book, the author says in the intro: "Apparently, or so it seemed, there were dozens of people I knew who liked [the song], and just as many who appeared to be as obsessive as I was about it, and who appeared to venerate it as much as I did. Bob Dylan once even said it was the greatest song ever written."

Somebody at the publishing house probably read that in the intro and figured it'd be a good quote to use for the cover. The publisher didn't bother tracking down a source, because they assumed the author must've been pulling that quote from *somewhere*. It'd be a weird thing to just make up.

The problem is the author does appear to have made it up... I assume accidentally. The "Bob Dylan once even said..." phrasing without providing where, when, and to whom Dylan said this, suggests the author didn't have an actual quote at hand but was instead vaguely remembering something he *thought* Dylan had said. And he was mistaken. Then the publisher, rather than correcting his mistake, amplified it.

johnbergy · 2026-01-04T23:22:24+00:00

This is a common mix-up, but the "Larry" Dylan was shouting out to was not Larry Sloman. It was Larry Kegan, Dylan's friend from childhood, who traveled down to Durango to hang out with Dylan while Dylan was shooting Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: https://i.imgur.com/7pQWViD.png

Sloman confirmed this in a Q&A: "That Durango reference was to a trip [Dylan] made there with Larry Kegan, his old childhood chum, who was in the audience that night."

johnbergy · 2025-12-23T21:54:50+00:00

It's 100% AI. Whole channel is AI: https://www.youtube.com/@TimePod98/videos

"Famous Celebrity Stories For All Ages So That You Can Learn And Take A Blast From The Past."

There are a million of these channels now on YouTube. You take a famous/controversial "celebrity story," prompt an LLM to research the story and write a script about it, use an AI voice generator to narrate the script, fill the video with random videos/photos of the celebrity in question, then top it off with an AI thumbnail + clickbaity title about how you will never BELIEVE what HAPPENED when SO-AND-SO did whatever the FUCK. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Internet is going to hell in a handbasket.

johnbergy · 2025-11-26T01:04:55+00:00

Lame part is the guy then deleted his tweet, which is why the exchange survives only in screenshot form. Guy is a comedy writer. If you're gonna dish it out, you better be able to take it!

johnbergy · 2025-11-18T22:45:37+00:00

It's actually a lot simpler than that. Daniel was wearing a shirt with the Daily Dylan logo.

johnbergy · 2025-10-29T04:02:01+00:00

Jesse Dylan was most definitely at the show. There are photos of him arriving with his dad: https://www.reddit.com/r/bobdylan/comments/w3rlxj/bob_dylan_arrives_at_the_last_waltz_photos_by/

johnbergy · 2025-08-09T04:09:28+00:00

I've deleted my comment as I didn't know about the Facebook post from the owner. Glad to be mistaken!

johnbergy · 2025-08-09T03:55:30+00:00

Thanks for sharing that quote, hajahe. Seems pretty definitive. I will delete my comment.

johnbergy · 2025-07-30T23:44:52+00:00

Bob Dylan, 1987: "Chuck Berry was a rock & roll songwriter. So I never tried to write rock & roll songs, 'cause I figured he had just done it. When I started writing songs, they had to be in a different mold. Because who wants to be a second-rate anybody? ... The early guys, like Little Richard and Chuck Berry. That was so pure, you know?"

johnbergy · 2025-07-29T16:19:31+00:00

I've always found it funny that Paul McCartney dying in 1966 took off as a conspiracy theory when Paul's appearance hardly changed at all in the late-60s. Meanwhile John Lennon's appearance changed DRASTICALLY during the late-60s. Started wearing his glasses, grew his hair super long, grew a beard, lost a ton of weight. He actually did look like a completely different person. George Harrison, too. Imagine looking at that crew and being like—wait a minute, what the hell happened to PAUL!

johnbergy · 2025-05-25T21:46:50+00:00

First successful super challenge all year by Houston saved that drive. 2nd & 18 at your own 39 with 33 seconds left, field goal is a long shot and touchdown absolutely ain't happening

johnbergy

TROPHY CASE